Chapter 6: The Researcher at the Door

The knock came at eleven minutes past two.

Vera knew it was coming the way she knew most things — not through any particular premonition but through the accumulation of small evidence assembled over days, weeks, the long patient arithmetic of observation that centuries had made automatic. The figure in the street below had been the same figure three mornings running. The angle of regard. The way a person stood when they were convincing themselves to move. She had catalogued these things without meaning to, the way she catalogued everything, and so when the sound arrived — three knocks, evenly spaced, the middle one fractionally harder than the others — she was already at the foot of the stairs.

She had not discussed this with Callum. There had been no occasion to discuss it; he was at the morgue, working his way through whatever the Thursday shift required of him, and she had not left a note, and she would not have known what the note should say. *I believe the person who has been watching the flat will knock this afternoon. I intend to answer. I would like you not to be here when she does.* The last sentence was the only true one, and she could not have said exactly why.